Human rights lawyer and Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), Femi Falana, has said that the late environmental rights activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and eight other Ogoni leaders were wrongly executed by the military regime of General Sani Abacha in 1995.
Falana stated this during the Ken Saro-Wiwa 30th Memorial Lecture held on Friday at the Banquet Hall of Hotel Presidential, Port Harcourt, Rivers State. The event, themed “Ken Saro-Wiwa – The Man, His Legacies, Struggles and Challenges,” was reported by Arise News.
Reflecting on the Ogoni crisis of the 1990s, Falana recalled that the conflict arose from the environmental degradation caused by oil exploration activities of Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC).
According to him, the Abacha-led government, in a bid to silence Saro-Wiwa and the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), conspired to implicate them in the murder of four Ogoni chiefs.
“Ken and his comrades did not commit murder, please take it from me,” Falana declared. “What happened was that the Nigerian State decided, ‘we’re going to deal with MOSOP led by Ken,’ and the only way to do it was to allow Shell to continue exploiting Ogoni resources without resistance, and to charge your leaders for murder.”
Falana’s remarks reignited public discourse on the injustice surrounding the 1995 executions, which remain one of the darkest chapters in Nigeria’s human rights history.
